This guide explains how to integrate APC (Alternative PHP Cache) into PHP5 on a Fedora 8 system (with Apache2). APC is a free and open PHP opcode cacher for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and XCache.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I have tested this on a Fedora 8 server with the IP address 192.168.0.100 where Apache2 and PHP5 are already installed and working. I'll use Apache's default document root /var/www/html in this tutorial for demonstration purposes. Of course, you can use any other vhost as well, but you might have to adjust the path to the info.php file that I'm using in this tutorial.

2 Checking PHP5's Current State

First, before we install APC, let's find out about our PHP5 installation. To do this, we create the file info.php in our document root /var/www/html:

vi /var/www/html/info.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Afterwards, we call that file in a browser: http://192.168.0.100/info.php

As you see, we have PHP 5.2.4 installed...

... but APC isn't mentioned anywhere on the page:

3 Installing APC

APC is a PHP extension that can be installed using PECL. PECL comes with the php-pear package, so we install that now:

yum install php-pear

Furthermore we must install some APC dependencies so that PECL can build APC:

yum install php-devel httpd-devel

yum groupinstall 'Development Tools'

yum groupinstall 'Development Libraries'

Now that all dependencies are installed, we can install APC as follows:

If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries
in a given directory, LIBDIR, you must either use libtool, and
specify the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR'
flag during linking and do at least one of the following:
- add LIBDIR to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH' environment variable
during execution
- add LIBDIR to the `LD_RUN_PATH' environment variable
during linking
- use the `-Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR' linker flag
- have your system administrator add LIBDIR to `/etc/ld.so.conf'

See any operating system documentation about shared libraries for
more information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Now that APC is installed, we create the configuration file /etc/php.d/apc.ini. We must at least add the line extension=apc.so in there; all other configuration options are optional. You can find a list of all available configuration options on http://de2.php.net/manual/en/ref.apc.php.

vi /etc/php.d/apc.ini

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_size=30

That's it. Restart Apache, and you're done:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Afterwards, open info.php again in a browser: http://192.168.0.100/info.php

You should now see APC mentioned on the page which means it has successfully been integrated and is working as expected:

5 Comment(s)

Comments

Your step-by-step guide is right on the money. Even thoug my server is quite capable of displaying file upload progress using APC RFC1867, my Drupal configuration was complaining about the lack of uploadprogress. Luckily, I found your howto page. I'am glad I did.

First, I can't thank you and all of the other open source or free software packages enough. You are absolutely amazing people!

This tutorial worked splendidly.

Two quirks for me:

1. When I first set up the server, php.ini was in /etc. Then I cooked up my own version of PHP and the new location of the active php.ini file changed to /opt/php5/lib/php.ini. I was pounding away at etc/php.ini with no results. :o(

2. Even though the active php.ini file says that dynamic extensions are loaded automatically if they have an .ini file in /etc/php.d, and even though I put an apc.ini in that folder, APC did not get loaded. I had to get the right php.ini file and add the line from the make output (extension=apc.so). Then I got the expected result from phpinfo.php.

Worked fine and dandy for me, too... thanks much for taking the time to do it... my system seemed to hang when running the transaction test portion of the install when groupinstalling the Development Libraries, but I just let it run and eventually it finished.